Popular torrent site ‘Demonoid’ shut down as gift to U.S. government

Following a massive denial-of-service attack on July 24th that left millions of would-be pirates in the dark, the Ukrainian government has shuttered popular file-sharing website Demonoid. An executive for the company that hosted the service, ColoCall, confirmed that authorities seized information from Demonoid’s servers and the service provider was forced to terminate the agreement it had with the site, Ukrainian news source Kommersant reported. A source inside the Interior Ministry also claimed the raid was timed to coincide with Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky‘s first trip to the United States to discuss copyright infringement. Demonoid, which was one of the world’s oldest torrent services, attracted millions of users each month, although it was blocked for Ukrainian locals to comply with the country’s copyright laws.